Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries

by Kory Stamper

It may be observed that the English language is not a system of logic, that its vocabulary has not developed in correlation with generations of straight thinkers, that we cannot impose upon it something preconceived as an ideal of scientific method and expect to come out with anything more systematic and more clarifying than what we start with: what we start with is an inchoate heterogeneous conglomerate that retains the indestructible bones of innumerable tries at orderly communication, and our definitions as a body are bound to reflect this situation. —PHILIP BABCOCK GOVE, Merriam-Webster in-house “Defining Techniques” memo, May 22, 1958

We approach this raucous language the same way we approach our dictionary: word by word.

Throughout this book, I will be using the singular “their” in place of the gender-neutral “his” or the awkward “his or her” when the gender of the referent isn’t known. I know some people think this is controversial, but this usage goes back to the fourteenth century. Better writers than I have used the singular “their” or “they,” and the language has not yet fallen all to hell.

hagiography,

It wasn’t story (good or bad) that pulled me in; it was English itself, the way it felt in my braces-caged mouth and rattled around my adolescent head. As I grew older, words became choice weapons: What else does a dopey, short, socially awkward teenage girl have? I was a capital-n Nerd and treated accordingly. “Never give them the dignity of a response” was the advice of my grandmother, echoed by my mother’s terser “Just ignore them.” But why play dumb when I could outsmart them, if only for my own satisfaction?

And “fricative”—that sounded hopelessly, gorgeously obscene.

approached the professor after class. I wanted, I told him, to major in this—Icelandic family sagas and weird pronunciations and whatever else there was.

gobbled up “sing” and “singeth” without much thought about why the forms were so different. My only thought was stupid English. But those illogical lunacies of English that we all suffer through and rage against aren’t illogical at all. It’s all spelled out here, in the baby pictures of English.

Neither group realizes that their dictionary is a human document, constantly being compiled, proofread, and updated by actual, living, awkward people. In that unassuming brick building in Springfield, there are a couple dozen people who spend their workweek doing nothing but making dictionaries—sifting the language, categorizing it, describing it, alphabetizing it. They are word nerds who spend the better parts of their lives writing and editing dictionary definitions, thinking deeply about adverbs, and slowly, inexorably going blind. They are lexicographers.

“sprachgefühl,” a German word we’ve stolen into English that means “a feeling for language.” Sprachgefühl is a slippery eel, the odd buzzing in your brain that tells you that “planting the lettuce” and “planting misinformation” are different uses of “plant,” the eye twitch that tells you that “plans to demo the store” refers not to a friendly instructional stroll on how to shop but to a little exuberance with a sledgehammer. Not everyone has sprachgefühl, and you don’t know if you are possessed of it until you are knee-deep in the English language, trying your best to navigate the mucky swamp of it.

“Office chitchat of the sort you’re likely used to,” he grumped, “is not conducive to good lexicography and doesn’t happen.”

It’s not that editors don’t like fun; it’s that we like our fun to be a little less whoop-y.*7 “We’re not antisocial,” says Emily Vezina, a cross-reference editor. “We’re just social in our own way.”

Lexicographers spend a lifetime swimming through the English language in a way that no one else does; the very nature of lexicography demands it. English is a beautiful, bewildering language, and the deeper you dive into it, the more effort it takes to come up to the surface for air.

You must set aside your own linguistic and lexical prejudices about what makes a word worthy, beautiful, or right, to tell the truth about language.

We’re already working on the next update to that dictionary, because language has moved on. There will never be a break. A dictionary is out of date the minute that it’s done.

“Measly” is defined in the Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, as “contemptibly small.” Emily Brewster thinks it might be the best definition in the whole book.

It’s currently stuffed with old dictionaries and a small table, around which four editors can sit comfortably and six in introverted terror, warily holding their elbows to their sides and breathing shallowly so as not to make unintentional physical contact with anyone else in the room.

The Transitizer, as some of us call it, is a pink with a sentence on it and a hole cut out where the verb of the sentence is so you can lay the card over your problem verb and read the resulting sentence to see if that verb is, in fact, transitive. The Transitizer reads, “I’ma ______ ya ass.” I’ma bend ya ass (to Webster’s will). There you go: this sense of “bend” must be transitive.

The language is thus protected, kept right, pure, good. This is commonly called “prescriptivism,” and it is unfortunately not how dictionaries work at all. We don’t just enter the good stuff; we enter the bad and the ugly stuff, too. We are just observers, and the goal is to describe, as accurately as possible, as much of the language as we can. This approach is “descriptivism,” and it is the philosophical basis for almost all modern dictionaries. All a word needs to merit entry into most professionally written dictionaries is widespread and sustained use in written English prose.

Don’t think Defoe didn’t like English. He goes on to say, “By such a society I daresay the true glory of our English style would appear; and among all the learned part of the world be esteemed, as it really is, the noblest and most comprehensive of all the vulgar languages in the world.”

If that seems presumptuous, realize this: literacy (particularly formal education) was booming in the eighteenth century, and it wasn’t too long before “good grammar” became the dividing line between the educated, well poised, polite, and morally upright and the ignorant, vulgar, and morally compromised. English, the grammarians claimed, was a system that could be reduced to a set of logical rules and expectations, and these logical rules expressed right thinking.

“In summary of the proof: grammar is the science of using words rightly, leading to thinking rightly, leading to deciding rightly, without which—as both common sense and experience show—happiness is impossible. Therefore, happiness depends at least partly on good grammar.”

but that the contractive “it’s” was a misuse and mistake for the contraction “ ’tis,” which was the more standard contraction of “it is.” This was a war that the pedants lost: “ ’tis” waned while “it’s” waxed.

One of the grammatical hallmarks of English is that you can stick a preposition at the end of a sentence without any deleterious effect whatsoever. In fact, the terminal preposition isn’t just possible, but is and has been standard operating procedure for prepositions from the very beginnings of English. The terminal preposition had been in continuous, easy use seven hundred years before John Dryden was in short pants, and it continues in easy, idiomatic use. You can, of course, choose not to end your sentence with a preposition, but that is a stylistic choice, not a grammatical diktat from on high.

The fact is that many of the things that are presented to us as rules are really just the of-the-moment preferences of people who have had the opportunity to get their opinions published and whose opinions end up being reinforced and repeated down the ages as Truth.

And thus it ever was: Jonathan Swift disparages the use of contractions as evidence of “the deplorable Ignorance that for some Years hath reigned among our English Writers; the great Depravity of our Taste; and the continual Corruption of our Style,” then turns around and uses them all over the place in his Journal to Stella.

Humanity sets up rules to govern English, but English rolls onward, a juggernaut crushing all in its path.

poniards.

Many of the rules that have been codified into “grammar” uphold an ideal, not a reality.

If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, have a natural tendency to degeneration; we have long preserved our constitution, let us make some struggles for our language.

As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.

2 on·y·mous \ˈänəməs\ adj : bearing a name; especially : giving or bearing the author’s name <an onymous article in a magazine> (MWU)

“Juggernaut” is an adaptation of one of the Hindi names for Vishnu, Jagannāth, “lord of the world.”

I had hoped this would be an isolated letter, but no: more came in, and I had to answer each of them point for point. I regret to inform you, I would write, that “irregardless” is in fact a word: it is a “series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use,”*2 and not only is it a word, but it is one with a surprising amount of use in written, edited prose for reasons that are unclear to the humble drudge.

It may be that “irregardless” isn’t the superlative form of “regardless,” as my correspondent claimed, but an intensive form of “regardless,” just like the infix “fucking” turns “absolutely” into the intensive “absofuckinglutely.”

Each of the currents in the river English is a different kind of English: business jargon, specialized vocabulary used in the construction industry, academic English, youth slang, youth slang from 1950, and so on. Each of these currents is doing its own thing, and each is an integral part of English.

that I realized how important dialects are to a language. They give us lots of vocabulary, and their proliferation is a sign of linguistic growth. It wouldn’t be overstating it to say that without dialects there is no language.

One incredulous e-mail response to my video continued to claim “irregardless” wasn’t a real word. “It’s a made-up word that made it into the dictionary through constant use!” the correspondent said, and I cackled gleefully before responding. Of course “irregardless” is a made-up word that was entered into the dictionary through constant use; that’s pretty much how this racket works. All words are made-up:

up:

the schoolmaster Richard Mulcaster’s 1582 Elementarie (or, more properly, The First Part of the Elementarie Vvhich Entreateth Chefelie of the Right Writing of Our English Tung, Set Furth by Richard Mulcaster) ended with a list of around 8,000 words that every learned student should know; Edmund Coote’s 1596 The English Schoole-Maister contained a list of about 1,680 words.*2

First was Nathaniel Bailey, whose 1721 An [sic] Universal Etymological English Dictionary*4 not only included everyday words but also gave extensive histories, notes on various uses, and stress marks so people would know where to put the emphasis on a word they might have only read.

Because of the seriousness of the charge, and because Johnson was scholarly but not a proper scholar, he began work on his dictionary the way that all of us now do: he read. He focused on the great works of English literature—Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Locke, Pope—but also took in more mundane, less elevated works. Among the books that crossed his desk were research on fossils, medical texts, treatises on education, poetry, legal writing, sermons, periodicals, collections of personal letters, scientific explorations of color, books debunking common myths and superstitions of the day, abridged histories of the world, and other dictionaries.

It’s a small change, just a little slip in the linguistic tectonic plates of “bored,” but lexicographers can feel the shock waves ripple through the language. Because it may be that this particular use of “of” here in “bored of” is the beginning of a new meaning of “of,” and that, my friends, is the sort of thing that gets lexicographers all hot and bothered.

I slid the file drawer closed and plodded down to the basement, where we kept the old editorial library books next to the rolls of packing tape and the ghost of George Merriam, doomed to moan for eternity about the price of ink and the crazy demands of the Webster family.

So we aim for the even middle: a variety of resources with some depth.

One of the complaints against Webster’s Third New International Dictionary was that it included a number of quotations—forty-five in all—from Polly Adler’s book A House Is Not a Home.

Much was made in 2015 of Bryan Henderson, the Wikipedia editor whose personal mission was to delete and revise all appearances of “is comprised of” on the open-source encyclopedia. He has made—by hand—over forty-seven thousand edits to the site, most of them replacing “is comprised of” with “is composed of” or “consists of.”

to reading and marking, each editor brings their own idiolect—their own unique collection of vocabulary, grammar, dialect markers, specialized vocabulary gleaned from hobbies, and other linguistic odds and ends you pick up as you move through time and space in English.

He offered a better paraphrase one day when I was complaining about an entry: “Words are stubborn little fuckers.”

The goal of a dictionary is to tell people what words mean and show them how they are used in the most objective, dispassionate, and robotic way possible. People do not come to the dictionary for excitement and romance; that’s what encyclopedias are for. They just want to glance at an entry, get a sense of what the word they’re looking at means, and then get back to finishing their homework, love letter, or all-caps, keyboard-mashing screed.